Reach the Total Audience: The Challenge of Multiscreen Delivery

In the early days of online video, it was as easy as posting a video file and letting viewers access it. Not anymore. Now the landscape is fractured with multiple devices, platforms, video formats, and more. Reaching the viewer, no matter what device they're using, has become a significant hurdle.

How complex is streaming to viewers nowadays? At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Kevin Louden, product manager for Telestream, talked about the challenges content owners face.

"As you get closer to the viewer, the complexity grows exponentially. You've got a movie, and then a movie gets made into multiple distribution mezzanine files, and that's what goes to these guys," Louden said, referring to his fellow panelists. "And then, from that they're blowing that out even farther for iOS and for Android and for Flash and everything else: This is going to this country so it has this kind of subtitling, and this is going here and it's got this kind; this particular content is coming from this content provider and they're providing their metadata this way, and it needs to be translated to get to here."

The industry has grown past the level where companies will do the work in-house. Nowadays, preparing and transcoding content for multiscreen delivery means hiring the right people.

"As you get closer to the actual viewer, the amount of prep that you have to do grows wider and wider and wider," Louden continued. "Making sure you either have tools that can do that or have people who can do it for you is very important, because it gets very complex."

To hear more on content preparation, watch the full panel discussion below.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net